Data on the net sources of ¢nance for France are used to argue that the French ¢nancial system was never an e¨conomie d'endettement, and to question the idea that France has converged on the Anglo-Saxon model under the impact of ¢nancial innovation and deregulation since the early 1980s. These data and additional qualitative information suggest that in the French ¢nancial system ¢rms and their managers have more autonomy and more control over the allocation of ¢nancial resources than their counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon countries or Japan, and the French system should not therefore be seen as a merè halfway-house' between these two polar types.
" IntroductionIn this paper we give a characterization of the French ¢nancial system by reference both to conventional French views as embodied in the concept of the e¨conomie d'endettement and to the discussion of ¢nancial systems initiated by Mayer (e.g. 1988Mayer (e.g. , 1990 and extended by Corbett and Jenkinson (1994) and others. We report data for France collected according to the net sources of ¢nance methodology developed by these authors so that we can compare our results for France with theirs for other countries. On this basis we argue that it was never correct to describe the French ¢nancial system as an e¨conomie d'endettement. We also question the nature and extent of the convergence of France on the Anglo-Saxon model under the impact of the ¢nancial innovation and deregulation that has occurred since the early 1980s. Finally, we use both these data and some more qualitative information on the relationships between banks and industry in France to argue that the French ¢nancial system is dis-
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